She died in August of 2020, alone in a hospital after months of being "locked down" in a retirement home, where she caught COVID-19 anyway. The lockdown commenced a week before I had planned on flying up to Missouri from Florida for a visit.
She became a very devout Christian when I was about 10. She was formally a Christian before that, but a lot less intense about it. My brother Mike once said that until he started school, he thought his name was "shitass." I remember that word, although not with the frequency he implied having heard it.
Her lifetime covered a lot of change, both personal and societal. She was born in a log cabin her family lived in because her father worked as a sharecropper for the freed slave who built it. In southern Missouri in 1933, a white man working as a sharecropper for a black man was definitely considered poor.
But her father got together the money to buy a farm of his own. They moved there when she was seven.
For several years, she and her sisters had to carry water to the house from the creek half a mile away because the well on the farm was no good and it was some time before they could afford to have a new one dug.
They got their first non-tractor motor vehicle when she was 12. Before that, they walked to town or hitched the mules to a wagon -- the same wagon my cousins and I played on decades later. All that was left of it were the wheels, axles, and center board running front to rear. We'd all hop on and get the wagon rolling down a hill, and the last one who hadn't jumped off "won." Nobody died, but I'm kind of surprised.
They got a telephone (party line) and electricity in the 1950s -- after Mom married Dad in 1951 (they remained married for 66 years until his death).
I'm not sure when they got running water, because there was always a sink in the house when I was alive ... but I was probably 12 years old when all the men in the family came out to tear part of the roof off, lower a bathtub and toilet inside, build them their first indoor bathroom, and replace the roof. That would have been in the late 1970s. Now that I think of it, I suspect the only reason they did away with the outhouse/washtub system was because they were nearing retirement and were preparing the house to be saleable.
So even though we were first "poor," then "lower middle class," I suspect she thought we were doing pretty well. By the time I was 10, there was air conditioning and color TV in the house. Not long after, we even got one of them there new-fangled microwave ovens. There were always two cars in the driveway -- my dad's pickup truck and a family sedan -- although I don't think they ever bought a brand new vehicle off the lot (when they got married, my dad was driving a 1935 Ford coupe with a rumble seat).
I know she worked "outside the home" before I was born, at factories in Kansas City -- Russell Stover, wrapping chocolates, and an envelope factory. When we lived on our small farm, she ran a garden covering at least an acre and raised and canned enough vegetables that I doubt we ever bought canned stuff unless she needed pineapple for an "upside down cake" or something. After we moved into town, she worked at a nursing home until she was badly burned in an accident that should never have happened (I think she got some kind of settlement out of that, but not the "we're rich" kind or anything).
After she recovered, she decided she should do more with my dad and took up golf (he usually played at least 18 holes every weekend before retiring, and several times a week after). She also kept a garden until she and Dad moved into their final home together, a small apartment. And she taught Sunday School.
By the time of that apartment, she and Dad had pretty much all the latest tech except for a computer, which neither of them ever expressed any interest in. Flat-screen TVs, DVD players, cell phones. Matching powered recliners! And only one car in the driveway, a big, IIRC, Chevy Caprice. Dad hated compact cars. So far as I know he never bought a Cadillac, but I think he may have had a Lincoln Continental for a little while.
A long way from log cabins, outhouses, mule-drawn wagons, and the dry cell radio her dad finally bought after Pearl Harbor.
My "inheritance" when she died was a few hundred dollars and some family pictures/knick-knacks, and I was glad she had taken my advice and used her lifetime of thrift and savings to live well in her "golden years" (and, at the end, pay for the retirement facility) instead of handing it off to her kids. Being raised by her was the real inheritance, and it was substantial.
